Biodata ID Confirmed: Device Unlocked
A while back, Apple released the first ever smartphone. Initially, there were two ways to access it. Either leave the thing unlocked, or use a four digit pin for security. Eventually, they introduced more options. Fingerprint ID, six digits, different pattern locks and password codes. When the fingerprint ID came out, convenience caught me like a catfish on a hook. Nowadays, it's standard, not really anything special. Within the last couple years, they even made it a possibility to use a face scanner to unlock a ton of devices. With every cellphone upgrade, I kept the same four digit verification as my passcode. 9932 was my go-to for most everything from my home security system to my bank account password, but I would stick almost exclusively to the fingerprint scanner, using the thumb on my dominant hand. It was just so easy, barely even took a second thought, and I was sure that my phone was completely secure that way. Between a pin and a thumbprint ID, what could go wrong? As far as I was concerned, I had nothing to worry about.
A year ago, I got into a fight with my blender. I call it a fight, really, it was more like my stupid mistake that led the appliance to defend itself. I jammed my whole hand into it to retrieve a ring that had fallen off, a ring that was trapped underneath the four, razor sharp blades. The damn ring wasn’t even that important, it was just some cheap copper cast bling from a Walmart jewelry set. Rather than unplugging the whole thing and disassembling it safely, I thought to myself, “I’ll just reach in and grab it real quick. What’s the worst that can happen?”
In less than five seconds, my boob accidentally mashed the start button, and with a sound like a wood chipper, my dominant hand was left as an oversized, bloody stub with prolapsed knuckles. When shock kicks in, most people feel a rush of warmth, almost like a deep blush, and sometimes, they don’t really understand exactly what they’re looking at.
I remember staring at what was left of my digits, not fully comprehending what had happened, and thinking, “that can’t be right, why does my hand look like an inside out rhubarb?” As soon as the realization began to dawn, I was introduced to a pain like no other. I picked up my phone and frantically tried unlocking it with my thumb, a thumb that was now bony pulp, emulcified and pooling under the quiet blades of the blender. The shiny ring still glimmered cruelly from the bottom of the clear plastic machine. It took three attempts of smooshing the “thumb” side of my appendage into the home button before shredded nerve endings alerted me to the scale of my predicament. I gritted my teeth and entered the four digit passcode using my non-dominant hand. 9932. Fifteen minutes later, I was losing consciousness in the back of an ambulance on my way to the ER.
Almost every bone in my hand was obliterated. The doctors said that very little of my hand still had skin, and most of the flesh was like uncooked hamburger meat. My fingers were all completely gone, and a good chunk of the palm was unsalvageable. I spent a while in the SICU of my city's shittily-funded hospital, pitifully bitching my way through a series of bone grafts and skin procedures. In the end, I was left with a bright pink, tight, zit-shaped knob that extended two inches past my wrist. One continuous line of ugly, black stitches went from left to right, decorating my new tip like a macabre sandwich bag zipper.
Eventually, I was back home. My dads stayed in for a week or so to help with recovery, but once I started showing progress in physical therapy, they decided that their job was done and fucked off back to Vermont. To be fair, I guess they were right. The night I came home from the hospital, my dads had a look on their faces that I won’t forget. They’d seen something traumatizing. When I asked about the noticeable odor that filled my kitchen and dining room, they had a sit down discussion with me.
When an uncomfortable situation arises, I’ve noticed that most people tend to speak less and imply more. Unless one happens to be a very straightforward person with few reservations towards disagreement, most people just dance around their point to avoid conflict, a trait that both of my dads share. They gently meandered conversationally. It reminded me of when I was ten, when they tried to indirectly explain the birds and the bees to me, the day they found porn on my laptop. But now, as an adult, I was better suited to gather what they were trying to tell me. The road trip from their place in Vermont to mine is nineteen hours normally, twelve if luck sides with the traveler, which unfortunately didn’t happen. My house sat empty for almost a full day from the moment I got into the ambulance, to the moment my dad with grey hair opened the front door. Half a cup or so of my viscera was still sitting on the counter inside the kitchen appliance, and logically, smelled how one would assume it would after being left out for so long. They cleaned up the mess to the best of their abilities, and the biomatter waste removal guys disposed of the whole blender, per my request. Despite their attempts to improve my home aroma using everything they could, from candles to Febreeze, the smell just continued to linger…
“So, it’s me? I’m the smell?” I asked.
“Oh sweetheart,” my dad with brown hair cooed, “no actually… well, I guess, yeah. I mean, it is what it is. What can you do?”
“Well for one, why didn’t you try opening all the windows and setting up fans to air it out?” I raised an eyebrow, gently holding my sore injury so as to not cause myself more discomfort.
“Wow, that’s a really good idea,” my dad with grey hair said sarcastically, crossing his arms and turning to look pointedly at my dad with brown hair, “yeah honey, remind me. Why didn’t we do that? Gosh, I think I recall someone telling me, ‘nah, we just need more candles.’”
“Jeez Lance, can we not right now?” My dad with brown hair groaned.
Satisfied, my grey headed father glanced at me as if to say, “I told him so, but he wouldn’t listen.”
We sat uncomfortably for a moment, allowing the information to settle over us like a cold blanket. Finally, I broke the silence, asking, “Never mind the smell, what did it look like?”
“What?”
“My fingers, what did they look like? All turned into… well, you know.”
“God Katie, we don’t really need to–”
“Dad, they were my fingers, they used to be attached to my hand. What did they look like when you got here?”
My brunette dad just stared at me like a fish out of water. After waiting a moment, my grey headed father spoke up.
“Well, we didn’t really get to look at it for very long, because those cleanup guys came and took care of it pretty soon after we got here,” he stated, “but it kind of looked like a maroon-ish chili.”
My dad with brown hair didn’t look at his partner, he just kept his eyes on me, but his expression transformed from gobsmacked to visibly unwell. My other dad continued.
“And um… I guess pulpy? You remember when we made tomato sauce when you were fifteen, but the tomatoes were still kind of whole? Not fully emulsified?”
“Yeah,” I humored, “chunky.”
At that, my brown haired father became physically sick. He stood up and rushed to my bathroom, making a disgusting retching sound.
“Ah, I reckon I’d better stop,” my grey old man mumbled.
“Oh, c’mon. Was there actually blood everywhere, or am I misremembering?” I pleaded, indulging in my morbid curiosity as I leaned forward in my seat.
My dad stroked his wispy beard, the sound of his husband emptying himself audible from a room over. He watched me like he was surveying me, carefully taking account of my condition and mulling over his words before he spoke, “Katie, I don’t really want to think about… look, I’m gonna be stuck in a car with your father for like nineteen hours in a few days, I don’t want him to be sick the whole way home. I love you girl, you’re a freak of nature with a good heart, but I think I done told you quite enough. Now, get some rest.”
He put his warm hand on my shoulder and stood up to meet my other dad in the bathroom, and the conversation was over. Then, seemingly in the blink of an eye, they were gone, making the trip home like they’d never been here in the first place. I was alone in my home again. Or so I thought.
I got better, physically. Mentally, I think there was some healing, but not much. I’m not sure if I’ll ever fully recover. Sometimes, I go to unlock my phone, and that, “tap to unlock with fingerprint,” message just taunts me from the bottom of my baby-blue screen, right above the home button. My eyes would linger on it for a few seconds, then I’d just tap the passcode in, and continue. I never deleted my old fingerprint from the phone, and I never swapped it to my remaining thumb. I would just manually enter that same memorized code. 9932.
I kept working at physical therapy. Eventually, the stitches got removed, and I learned to flex and curve the remains of my hand to act as a pseudo-mitten. I could pick up some cups if they had handles, I could balance tableware, and occasionally, when I would start to drift to sleep at night, I’d be torn awake to the sound of the blender’s skull splitting roar, like a chainsaw going off right next to my ear. A phantom shotgun blast of pain would rip through my knuckles and I would be transported right back in my kitchen, hand eviscerating as I reach for that stupid ring. On those nights, as soon as the sleep was ripped from my eyes and I’d shoot straight up, the sound would immediately disappear, like when drifting off is accompanied by that feeling of sudden falling. When wake finds the mind, a brief notion crosses like a vagabond crosses an empty street beneath the moon. “Am I sure I even really felt that?” But I knew I did. I always did.
I honestly think I could handle it, all of it, the trauma, the phantom pain, if not for what happened today when I got home from physical therapy. I forgot my phone on my kitchen table. Upon this discovery, a mile away from home, I decided not to turn around, and to just go on without it. It was only an hour, what could happen? I arrived home, unlocked my front door and made it inside, exhausted from the arm workouts. I was more than ready to binge a good show while eating a whole, fresh, steaming hot Tombstone pizza. But the moment I approached the table and saw it, my blood ran cold, every ounce of self assuredness tunnelling out of my body and abandoning my flesh like worms from a rotten apple core. The fleeting message displayed on the small, baby-blue, rectangular portal, juxtaposed against my petunia flower vase arrangement. The notification had so recently appeared, that it was barely fading by the time I read it, an oval of maroon grime stamped above the home button at the bottom of the screen.
“Biodata ID Confirmed: Device Unlocked.”
Someone had unlocked my phone using my dominant thumb, and it had been very, very recent.